FBI: NYC is the safest U.S. City

[TWiley]

Among cities with a population exceeding 500,000 residents, New York City tops the list of safest cities in America. The Big Apple saw a decrease of 4% in violent crime from 2007, handily beating the national average. The overall drop consists of a 9% decrease in assaults (the largest sub category), but is marred by a 5.4% increase in murder, 1.7% increase in rape and a 1.8% increase in robbery. New York City's per-capita crime rate hovers at 4.2%.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg touted the continuing downtrend in crime activity, declaring that New York City has had "43 fewer murders, 1,415 fewer robberies and 491 fewer cars stolen" in the first five months of 2009 compared to 2008. Bloomberg continued, "Using innovative policing strategies and a focus on keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, we are continuing to do more with less, in spite of the economic downturn."

Tuscon, Arizona, however, does have a lower crime rate than New York City, at 2.9% per-capita, but a lack of property crime statistics prevents it from achieving the top spot.

After New York, America's safest cities are: San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, El Paso, Honolulu, Denver, Boston, Las Vegas and Louisville.

And the U.S.'s least safe city? That distinction goes to Memphis, Tennessee, with a crime rate of 18% per capita, followed by Atlanta (16%), San Antonio (15.2%), Detroit (13.7%) and Milwaukee (13.4%). These rates reflect the total crimes detailed in the FBI's report divided by the population of the city.


New York also tops the list of safest cities with more than a million residents, beating out Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego and San Jose. These cities all saw an impressive reduction in all three major categories of crime.

Curiously, only the smallest category of cities - those with under ten thousand people - saw an increase in the number of murders, rapes and robberies.


Full Story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/realclearpolitics/20090605/cm_rcp/america039s_safest_cities

I thought Guns were supposed to make society more polite and safer. With strict gun laws in NYC, shouldn't there be rampant crime? Oh, the rampant crime is where the guns are.

[DesertFlower]

1. people are allowed to own

guns in tuscon, arizona.

[krispos42]

2. "Freakonomics" tackled this issue regarding NYC's crime rate

Ripped Guiliani's claims of being the crime-fightin' mayor to shreds.

[Duke Newcombe]

3. And the increase in murders, rape, and robbery in NYC...

Those were committed with, what...whiffle bats?

[sabbat hunter]

6. knives, homemade weapons

such as sharpened screwdrivers.

[baldguy]

10. Increased population.

[Enrique]

4. i'm surprised it went down everywhere

it had been going up, even before the worst of the bad economy. I was thinking it was just the beginning of crime epidemic but I guess it turned around.

[Statistical]

15. Crime rates peaked nationally over 10 years ago.

Turn off the news and turn on FBI crime statistics.

[benEzra]

18. No, it's been going down for years.

The MSM tried to play a couple of statistical spikes as new upward trends, but that wasn't the case.

[Caliman73]

23. Crime has gone down,

Crime reporting has gone WAY up.

[DesertFlower]

5. i'm a former new yorker.

i feel much safer in arizona where i own a handgun for personal protection.

[ElboRuum]

7. Funny, I saw a thread around here that said...

...that NYC was rife with crime (as are all the other cities with strict gun laws). Well, it seems that somebody's bullshittin'. Don't know who. Don't care who. The day you can have an intellectually honest conversation about the merits and liability of gun ownership in this country... well, I don't think I can hold my breath that long.

[TheWraith]

9. Read the stats more carefully.

They claim a big decrease in assaults, but admit that murders went up, rapes went up, and robberies went up.

Anyway, as mentioned upthread, New York City has a history of rewriting their crime stats to make the mayor look good ahead of elections.

[rl6214]

19. What exactly is an Intellectually Honest conversation

To you?

Did you not read the article? Murders, rapes and robberies were all up. I would say that would be a good arguement for gun ownership.

You can breathe now.

[ElboRuum]

22. Well...

An intellectually honest conversation is one where people don't obfuscate inconvenient truths just because it might cast an unfavorable light on their own position. Neither side in this debate is capable.

If you think that murders, rapes, and robberies is a good argument for gun ownership, I submit that there is precisely the same argument against.

[Euromutt]

26. There are some points to be considered there

If you think that murders, rapes, and robberies is a good argument for gun ownership, I submit that there is precisely the same argument against.

Well... no.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, "incidents involving a firearm represented 9% of the 4.7 million violent crimes of rape and sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated and simple assault in 2005" (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/guns.htm), so for every one of these crimes (taken collectively) committed with a firearm, there are ten that are committed without.
According to the Brady Campaign, fewer than 2% of rapes are carried out using a firearm, while almost 70% are carried out using personal (unarmed) force (http://www.bradycampaign.org/facts/factsheets/pdf/women.pdf).
And while the BJS also noted that "the FBI's Crime in the United States estimated that 66% of the 16,137 murders in 2004 were committed with firearms," the majority of homicides are committed by people who are prohibited by federal law from possessing a firearm, usually due to prior felony convictions. Another sizable amount is committed by people who had prior records of criminal behavior, even if they had not been convicted of anything that would have disqualified them from possessing a firearm. Together, they account for some 90% of American murderers. These are not people who will be deterred from acquiring a firearm by restricting private firearms ownership, and evidence from other countries with tighter gun laws indicates that criminals who want guns will find a way to acquire them.

There is a common misperception that gun crimes are typically committed on impulse by people who, up to that moment, would have been considered law-abiding citizens, and would have remained so were it not for the availability of the firearm. This is expressed in utterances like "they're all 'responsible gun owners' until they snap" or "they're all 'responsible gun owners' until they get drunk," both of which I've encountered in this forum in the past week. The criminological evidence, however, both from the United States and abroad, indicates that the kind of person who commits a crime using a firearm generally has a prior history of violence and/or mental problems. This also overlooks the fact, as illustrated above, that a large amount of violent crime is committed without firearms, and would therefore not be prevented by tightening restrictions of private gun ownership.

In short, the evidence indicates that restricting private gun ownership does little to prevent violent crime, while depriving law-abiding citizens of the most effective means to defend themselves against it.

[Euromutt]

25. You're comparing relative terms to absolute terms

As someone pointed out elsewhere in this thread, there are 34 cities in the United States with a population over 500,000. If the other 33 have higher crime rates than NYC, that makes NYC the "most safe" of those 34. It does not necessarily mean that NYC is not "rife with crime"; it could just mean that the other 33 are more rife. It also doesn't say anything about how New York compares to cities under 500,000.

It's rather hard to tell, because the article, despite coming from a source titled "Real Clear Politics," does not make it "real clear" what the "crime per capita" statistic means. According to the "in depth" article linked to, New York has a "crime per capita" of 4.8%. Does this mean that, on average, an inhabitant of NYC has a 4.8% chance of becoming the victim of one of the crimes encompassed in this figure? And what are those crimes? How is it possible to state that Tucson, AZ has a "crime per capita" rate of 2.9% if there are no statistics for property crime? And how are those crimes weighted? Is rape or murder counted as heavily as a pocket-picking or purse-snatching? I think most people would prefer to live in a city where, all other things being equal, they have a 10% chance of having their pocket picked than one where they have a 5% chance of being murdered.

[paulsby]

8. seattle

seattle is a remarkably safe city, and (last i checked) had a lower violent crime rate than NYC (but it has a population just under 500k, so wasn't compared city to city)

it's also a city in a right to carry state.

[dashrif]

11. Good

The overall drop consists of a 9% decrease in assaults (the largest sub category), but is marred by a 5.4% increase in murder, 1.7% increase in rape and a 1.8% increase in robbery. New York City's per-capita crime rate hovers at 4.2%.

You are less likely to have the crap beat out of you but more likely to be killed raped and robbed good trade off :toast: :eyes:

[X_Digger]

12. Four of the top ten safest were in Texas..more than any other state

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/08aprelim/spreadsheets/2008table4prelim.xls

I downloaded the raw data from the FBI and I have a slightly different interpretation of 'safe'.. Since Illinois doesn't report crime in a way that the FBI can use, their overall violent crime and rape rates can't be calculated. Hrmm! (Chicago is second only to NYC in raw number of murders, so I expect it would be close to the top overall if it reported correctly.)

Based on murder rate (per 100k), the top safe cities > 500k are:

HONOLULU 2.0
EL PASO 2.8
AUSTIN 3.1
SAN JOSE 3.3
SAN DIEGO 4.3
PORTLAND 4.7
SEATTLE 4.8
NEW YORK 6.3
DENVER 6.7
FORT WORTH 7.0

and the worst ten are
BALTIMORE 36.9
DETROIT 33.8
PHILADELPHIA 23.0
MEMPHIS 20.4
ATLANTA 19.7
CHICAGO 18.0
COLUMBUS 14.5
INDIANAPOLIS 14.1
JACKSONVILLE 13.9
DALLAS 13.3

Based on overall violent crime rate, the top 10 safest cities > 500k are-
HONOLULU
SAN JOSE
EL PASO
SAN DIEGO
AUSTIN
DENVER
SEATTLE
NEW YORK
PORTLAND
FORT WORTH

and the worst are
DETROIT
MEMPHIS
BALTIMORE
PHILADELPHIA
NASHVILLE
ATLANTA
MILWAUKEE
INDIANAPOLIS
HOUSTON
BOSTON


If anyone is interested in a cleaned up version of the spreadsheet that you can mess with, send me a message.

[yodoobo]

13. Thats good, although I feel the least safe in NYC than any city I know

But thats because of the extreme population density.

Its just freaky with so many people so close around you constantly.

Nice place to visit, but I don't know how the people who live there deal with it.

[NVJJC]

14. Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Phoenix among the safest

Those cities have little or no gun control and very high rates
of concealed firearms permits. 

Those stats require more study to apply results or conclusions
to any correlation to gun control.  

Even then, correlation is not causation.

[Euromutt]

16. So, safest out of cities with over half a million inhabitants

That's a bit of biased selection right there, since large urban areas tend to suffer more crime--both in absolute and relative terms--than less densely populated areas. I.e. there's tons of cities that are safer than New York, they're just not included in this study.

And we can see from the list that the safest cities are a mixed bag as far as gun laws are concerned. El Paso, Denver and Las Vegas are all in "shall issue" states, with no "assault weapon" restrictions or state prohibitions on NFA items (machine guns, short-barreled rifles and shotguns). Conversely, Milwaukee is in a state that is "<i>no</i> issue."

Cities like New York and Los Angeles have been putting a lot of work into developing more pro-active strategies in the past decade and a half, which mainly involves hiring lots of cops, holding local commanders accountable for responding to incidents in their respective areas, and "putting cops on the dots." One reason it's worked particularly well in New York is because it's so densely built up that it's easier to get more cops in the vicinity of crime hot spots without leaving gaping holes in patrol areas.

Another thing that has affected crime rates have been property prices. I know that sounds weird now, but these numbers relate to 2007, before the housing bubble popped. Rising housing prices in New York and Los Angeles drove out a lot of 15 to 24 year-olds, statistically the most likely people to commit crimes. In addition, from 2002 to 2007 (the year under discussion), New York, LA and Chicago lost 10% of their African-American population, while other cities did not. It's not a racial thing, it's a socio-economic thing; low-income natives tend to be less well-behaved than low-income immigrants (no matter what the anti-immigration crowd claims), and in the three cities in question, a fair chunk of the low-income native population was displaced by immigrants.

[X_Digger]

17. The lowest of the low (still >100k residents)

Would be.. Gilbert AZ, followed by Surprise, AZ, then Round Rock, TX, Amherst Town NY, Bellevue, WA.

[Israfel4]

20. Maybe if ALL the states reported their

crime uniformally we would see real results.

[Angleae]

21. Population 500000+ comprises a total of 34 cities.

New York City
Los Angeles
Chicago
Houston
Phoenix
Philadelphia
San Antonio
San Diego
Dallas
San Jose
Detroit
Jacksonville
San Francisco
Indianapolis
Columbus
Austin
Fort Worth
Memphis
Charlotte
Baltimore
Boston
El Paso
Milwaukee
Seattle
Nashville
Denver
Washington DC
Las Vegas
Louisville
Portland
Oklahoma City
Tucson
Atlanta
Albuquerque

[slackmaster]

24. Why do you people keep posting the same tired old silly strawman?

I thought Guns were supposed to make society more polite and safer.

That statement is usually made by gun control proponents, not by people who favor choice on guns. The point of having a gun for self-defense is to defend one's self, not to have some magical effect on society as a whole.

Since El Paso, Las Vegas, and Louisville made the top 10, it's pretty clear that gun laws don't have a whole lot to do with anything.